Someone tell me what Sonic games to play

Submitted by twovests in killallgames

Somehow, I became a Sonic fan, despite only consuming a little bit of media, most of it 20 years ago:

  • Sonic Adventure 2
    • My first gender awakening was when I learned Tails wasn't a girl. No way, right?
  • Sonic Heroes
  • Sonic and the Secret Rings
  • The first 10% of Sonic Adventure
  • Many Sonic comics
  • The Sonic devblogs
  • Wikipedia articles

I missed Shadow, 2006, Colors, Generations, Mania, Forces, Frontiers, the Werewolf game, that weird "Sonic Boom" series, and literally any of the 2D games.

Almost all of the post-SA2 games, I never played: Shadow the Hedgehog, Sonic 2006, Colors, Mania, Generations, the 2D games, Forces, Frontiers-- I've played none of them. The Werewolf game? The whole Boom series? The racing games? Lost World? A dozen racing games? A dozen Olympics? Mobile games? The dating game where Sonic dies?

And that's not to mention the PLETHORA of Sonic fangames, some of which -- if I understand -- are part of the Sonic cultural canon. Sonic Robo Blast 2 is such a rabbithole in and of itself.

What games should I play? Surely not all of them?

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emma wrote (edited )

play the original sonic the hedgehog. if you enjoy that, i suggest also playing these other 2d sonics:

  • sonic cd
    • introduces the spin dash.
    • play the japanese version. they absolutely butchered the american release. sega of america decided that slapping house music is too much for innocent, christian, american children to handle, so they replaced most of it with a bunch of other shit that's thematically unfitting, but left the 'past' versions of the tracks alone because they couldn't figure out how to replace the non-red book pcm audio.
    • this game is easy to beat, but hard to find all the secrets in.
  • sonic 2
    • refines the spin dash
    • has tails
  • sonic 3 and/or knuckles
    • yes there's actually three combinations. they split the game in half so they could rush it out as 'sonic the hedgehog 3'. then they released the other half of the game as 'sonic & knuckles'. if you stuck sonic 3 onto sonic & knuckles, you'd get to play the whole game as one, so basically it was dlc for the prehistoric era of gaming.
    • very long, stages are quite complex
  • sonic mania
    • 2017 game, homage to the old sonics
    • mixes old and new stages

don't play knuckles & chaotix, it sucks. also don't play sonic 4, it's a shitty cash grab.

i also recall sonic advanced being not terrible, which is high praise for a sonic game, really.

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voxpoplar wrote

A re-release of Sonic Generations just came called Sonic × Shadow Generations that ads a new campaign just for Shadow. Sonic Generations was already the best of the boost-style Sonic games but the Shadow Generations portion they added might be even better.

From the 2D side of things Sonic Mania is really good and there’s also a port of all the old Mega Drive games to the same engine on modern systems called Sonic Origins.

Sonic Frontiers is janky as all hell but I also love it and it’s honestly just really fun to move around in an open world as Sonic and I feel like the first game where they were finally figuring out how to actually do boss fights for Sonic (though they are still also janky as hell).

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devtesla wrote

Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed

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twovests OP wrote

Replying to emma (#23,061)

I appreciate this breakdown, I remember Mania receiving a lot of love.

I definitely tried to play the original a few times over the years but I never understood how Sonic was meant to be played. The levels in most 2D Sonics seem to zip by too fast for me to meaningfully interact with them. I think I might start with Mania and then move back

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